It’s been years now since my dad was employed as a philosophy professor. But that’s what he is, and what he should be doing. (Really he’d be an excellent guru, and an even better cult leader, if he had the ambition and worked up a good shtick.) He was laid off about five years ago from his last university and though he applies, of his own volition and as part of receiving unemployment, to several jobs a week, it’s been nothing. For about a year and a half he worked in insurance in some paper-shuffling capacity, but he was, a year ago, laid off from that, too.
Every few months a job possibility that really excites him comes up, and it’ll be all he offers for his side of the conversation. He’ll talk about moving logistics, and tell me all about the program, and his hopes are always so high. And it never comes to anything. It pisses me off. What, they only want inexperienced, unintelligent candidates, is that it? There’s no one better than my dad at expounding on hermeneutics. No one! They are missing out! He oozes charisma and erudition. There’s a reason his grad students like to sleep with him. He is a captivating professor.
But I worry his teaching career may be over. He’s too old, he’s now been out of the game too long, his publications are not sexy enough. The possibility of just giving up and calling himself retired and trying to live on that pittance, though, well, I don’t know that his battered self-esteem can take it. He’s used to being master in the classroom, and he’s not ready to admit defeat and call it a day on a career he’d love to continue. Plus, he’d like health insurance.
There was a period of about six months when I was desperately trying to break into social work and nothing was happening. The combination of impotence and desire–not to mention need–I recall was a constant cloud, a shame and disappointment that was hard to shake. I’m so unhappy my dad has been stuck feeling like his life’s work, all his knowledge and consideration and talent for teaching, is now, for all practical purposes, worthless. Because he’s not.
